More on the Durham Annex

With the benefit of a day to absorb the Durham annex and our discussion on X’s Spaces chat last night, it’s worth revisiting a few sections of the Durham report.

The narrative war has begun, neither side necessarily having more or better evidence for their position. Left wing outlets suggest, without evidence, that John Durham ran down all these Russian intelligence reports and found they were the work of Russian spies.

Right wing outlets suggest that the FBI was in on it and these emails are obviously legitimate.

We lean more towards these emails being authentic. Durham did not get to verify the authenticity of these emails, as the New York Times itself reported on, he was denied court orders that would have enabled him to do that. He appears to have received emails from Benardo and others through subpoenas but some perspective is needed. Durham appears to have attempted this at least 6-7 years after the emails were sent. It’s likely that any damning emails had long been deleted by that point.

The annex suggests the possibility of “composite” emails, or multiple email versions. Let’s think through the context of this.

Russia would have hacked Open Society Foundations (confirmed to have hacked Benardo), and translated any emails from English to Russian, and written intelligence memorandums on them. The Dutch then hacked the Russians and would have translated the intelligence memorandums from Russian to Dutch. Then the Dutch provided the intelligence to the CIA, so we translated the memorandums from Dutch to English (or at least Russian to English if the Dutch provided the source material).

That plausibly accounts for the differences in purported versions of an email. It remains to be seen whether any of these emails are on the 8 thumb drives of emails provided by the Dutch, or whether those thumb drives have been searched for these emails.

An internal Russian disinformation operation on the scale needed to fake all of this is implausible, and if there were such an operation, it wouldn’t have shut down after Brennan’s phone call.

Moreover, the plans alluded to in the Benardo email, like the “swift boat” email that has been out there, all align perfectly with what was actually happening at the time.

We believe there is additional reporting around Benardo and the plans of the Clinton campaign that did not make it into the annex. What exactly happened to that information and whether it is available to Kash Patel is unclear.